Massive Attack add huge Manchester show to 2025 tour plans

Massive Attack have added a huge Manchester show to their 2025 tour plans – check out details below.

• READ MORE: Act 1.5: Inside Massive Attack’s Bristol blueprint for the future of sustainable live music

The Bristol trip-hop duo – comprising of Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja and Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall – are set to headline the Co-op Live arena on June 5.

Pre-sale tickets are available from 10am on Wednesday March 5, and you can sign up to access those here. Alternatively, tickets go on general sale here this Friday (March 7) at 10am.

Their newest date falls the day before they top the bill at the inaugural LIDO festival in London’s Victoria Park on June 6. As part of their ongoing relationship with clean energy provider Ecotricity, the group’s set in the capital will be 100% powered by battery, significantly reducing carbon emissions and local air pollution.

Support for their LIDO set will come from AIR, Yasiin Bey and The Alchemist as FORENSICS, and Tirzah, with many more still to be confirmed.

The June dates follow Massive Attack’s Act 1.5 concert in Bristol last summer, which served as the UK’s biggest low-carbon gig ever, and their Act 1.5 “climate action accelerator” shows in Liverpool.

The band are vocal advocates for tackling the climate crisis, with both Del Naja and long-term collaborator Mark Donne speaking to NME about the changes they hoped to see across the music industry.

“We can’t give you details but we’re now talking to promoters about taking everything that made Bristol work and moving it into other cities. Potentially a promoter using exactly the same formula for all the series of shows across open spaces in the city for the whole year,” Del Naja said, reflecting on the success of the 2024 Bristol show.

“That’s what we want to happen. There’s no point in doing one-off exemplars, we want it to move into these practical areas.”

Looking ahead to their 2025 schedule, he explained why the band opted out of performing at Coachella. “We said no to Coachella for next year because again, we’ve been there once, and once was enough,” he continued.

“It’s in Palm Springs. It’s a golf resort built on a desert, run on a sprinkler system, using public water supplies. Mental. If you want to see something that’s the most ludicrous bit of human behaviour – it’s right there.”

Elsewhere, they shared plans to collaborate with the equally climate-conscious Billie Eilish on her 2025 European tour.

In other Massive Attack news, back in October the band cancelled their US tour – their first in five years – at the last minute due to what they describe as “unforeseen circumstances”.

Before then, NME attended the aforementioned Bristol event back in August, which aimed to re-envision how concerts can be staged sustainably.

“There is some truth in the idea that an iconic, veteran campaigning act like Massive Attack can make things (like bonus trains!) happen that other events might not so easily be able to pull off. And it’s true that a switched-on Bristol audience, fresh from electing a Green MP (who is also on-site and speaking on a panel), are likely to be receptive to a concept like this,” the report read.

“But there have to be some first-movers who push the boundaries and bring everyone else along with them. Massive Attack and their event partners are the first ones to bring all of the pieces of the low-carbon puzzle together. This is what the live music of the future will need to look like everywhere in the end.”